The Last 17 Years: The Case for a Better, Stronger, Safer Chicago: Karen Bass, Mayor Eric Adams, Beverly Los Angeles, and David J. Vallas

In New York State last year, the Republican candidates focused on crime and did a better job than usual. The Democrat candidates would try to change the subject. “I think those who stated, ‘Don’t talk about crime,’ it was an insult to Black and brown communities where a lot of this crime was playing out,” Adams said after the election. Nancy Pelosi told The Times that Democrats might have maintained control of the House if their candidates in New York had taken crime more seriously.

The dynamics in Chicago echoed mayor’s races in New York City in 2021, won by Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain, and Los Angeles in 2022, where then-Rep. Karen Bass defeated Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer who had pumped more than $100 million into a campaign focused on law and order.

Portland, the biggest city in Oregon, became a symbol of post-pandemic disorder last year. Between 2019 and 2022, murders nearly tripled, vandalism incidents nearly doubled and car thefts rose 69 percent.

Karen Bass, the recently elected mayor of Los Angeles, has developed arguably the most successful progressive message on crime. A former community organizer who spent 12 years in the House of Representatives, Bass defeated a more conservative candidate not by downplaying crime concerns but by talking about them frequently. Bass was a victim of a crime last year.

She called for harsher punishments on abusive officers and for hundreds of extra police officers in order to strike a balance. In her inaugural address, she said that crimes should be stopped and people held accountable. “Let me be so bold as to add that we can prevent crime and community violence by addressing the social, the health and the economic conditions that compromise a safe environment.”

The results show how the race is going to turn into a battle for Black voters support, and one in which the contrasting visions of Vallas and Johnson over policing are likely to take center stage.

The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Vallas – a former schools chief in Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Bridgeport, Connecticut, who ran on a pro-police message and pointed to officers in his family.

“No matter where you live, no matter what you look like, you deserve to have a better, stronger, safer Chicago,” Johnson said at his election night party last night.

In the March mayoral primary, in which many candidates vied, the surprise first-placer was Lightfoot who got 17.5% of the vote. She won the race against a well-known Chicago politician, as voters sought change.

Four years later, the Second City’s voters demonstrated how drastically its political dynamics have shifted when Lightfoot on Tuesday failed to finish in the top two and advance to the April runoff. Chicago is now the third major city in recent years with a mayoral election that will test attitudes – among a heavily Democratic electorate – toward crime and policing.

The outcome especially underscored the electorate’s focus on public safety. The city experienced a spike in violence between 2020 and 2021. The Chicago Police Department attributes the increase in other crimes since last year to the decrease in murders and shootings.

The Chicago Mayor’s Race for 2019 Matchup: The Impact of Crime on the Economy and the Workforce of Mayor Vallas and Chief Executive Officer Johnson

Paul Vallas, a former schools chief who campaigned on a tough-on-crime message, and Brandon Johnson, a Cook County commissioner with the backing of the influential teachers’ union, advanced to the head-to-head match-up in five weeks.

The city’s slow economic recovery from the pandemic is also connected to crime. The president and chief executive officer of McDonald’s told The Economic Club of Chicago last fall that he wasstruggling to convince potential employees to relocate to his West Loop headquarters.

He said that it just shows up in many different ways. “Crime becomes pervasive in peoples’ psyche, and it affects us. It’s keeping all of us back.

However, the results of 2019’s first round – with the first-place finisher qualifying for the runoff with the support of less than one-in-five Chicago voters – proved to be an omen of Lightfoot’s future difficulties.

The office she won has been a political lightning rod for a long time, without a base of support. It cost her some allies on her way to victory because of her tough talk on the campaign trail.

A 2019 fight with the Chicago Teachers Union over pay and class size as Lightfoot sought to curb spending led to an 11-day strike. The two had a disagreement last year when Lightfoot wanted teachers to come back to class despite rising Covid-19 cases.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/01/politics/lori-lightfoot-chicago-mayor-race-crime/index.html

Is Lightfoot the Mayor of Chicago? An Analysis of the Candidates Who Beat Lightfoot and Vallas in the November 2016 Chicago City Council Runoff

The union endorsed Johnson last fall, and propelled him into the nine-candidate field.

“Chicago is ready to break with the politics of the past that ignore the needs of our students, their families and school communities,” union President Stacy Davis Gates said of Tuesday’s election results.

In a fight last year with the police over overtime pay, she said that officers had an amount of time off that was excessive. It was the culmination of years of tension between the police and the administration after she sought to cut overtime spending.

On Wednesday, Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown announced he will resign in March – which will allow the next mayor to install new leadership at the department.

Bass defeated Caruso because of her plan to increase the number of police officers and declare a state of emergency to address the crisis of homelessness.

Vallas and Johnson have their strongest areas in the city’s northside, which is more white, while Lightfoot had her strongest performance in the south and west of the city.

Johnson, in his celebratory speech Tuesday night, showed the first signs that he will seek to consolidate liberals who supported someone else in the nine-person field. Each candidate was cited by name.

He said he would fight for public safety in the city, as well as for a city where the trains can run on time.

CHANG. Lightfoot did note a year-over-year drop in homicides last year, but there is no denying that there has been an overall spike in crime during her tenure. Is Lightfoot…

WASHINGTON: Well, I think it’s a very complicated issue. The city is dealing with many social and economic problems and challenges. There’s not enough of city money being devoted to anti-violence programs, to social service programs. We just went through a pandemic. We went through social unrest around the city. I believe some of that is responsible for the instability. But I think voters expect her to be able to – you know, she’s the mayor. They think she can solve the problem. Crime is still a problem. Every day people point the finger at her, when they hear about events and incidents.

CHANG: Well, let’s talk about the candidates who beat Lightfoot to head into the runoff. The former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Paul Vallas, is followed by a Cook County Commissioner. What are they offering in terms of improving public safety?

WASHINGTON: This is a very racially diverse city. That’s a good thing, but it’s also a segregated city. People of color vote for other candidates, and whites vote for white candidates. So what you saw in the campaign yesterday was the areas of the city which were predominantly white, more conservative, had more city workers, went to Vallas, and Brandon Johnson got the areas of the city that tended to be populated by more people of color. So there’s a debate around race. There is a discussion of the haves and the have-nots. That’s something that Brandon Johnson talked about in his acceptance speech.

The government of Washington. Paul Vallas would say that he wants to address some of the inequities in the city as well, but his big argument is that we need to get our public safety situation in line first.

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